Getting Skyrim Skytrim

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This is why I play PC games: ini files. I dream of ripping into the guts of a game, fiddling with the insides, yanking and tying off loops of intestine. I’m a gaming pathologist. So the first thing I did in Skyrim was head to My Documents -> My Games -> Skyrim -> skyrim, to see what was in there.

Not a lot, as it turns out. The main tweak I was hunting, to change the FoV, has to be added rather than altered. The game’s default is way too claustrophobic for me. But you can add “fdefaultfov=xx” without the quotes under the general section, replacing “xx” for your preferred FoV angle. 95 usually suffices for me, but you’ll obviously have your own preferences. Here’s the difference you can make.

EDIT: Apparently bringing the console down with the tilde key and typing “fov xx” works a bit better.

Before.

After.
I made that second 120 degrees to show how far you can take it. The next thing I did was head to the main Skyrim folder, nested within Steam > steamapps > common > skyrim. In the Data folder there’s a Video folder, and in there is the logo video that loads up when the game loads. I created a folder and dragged that into it to stop it loading every bloody time I start the game. Those seconds are precious to me, Bethesda.

Something you’ll also want to tweak if you have a reasonably meaty PC is self-shadowing, which means tall trees and the like cast shadows upon themselves – it adds rather a lot to outdoor scenes, making for a more integrated looking world. For this, you’ll want to edit SkyrimPrefs.ini: changing the 0s to 1s for Change bTreesReceiveShadows=0 and Change bDrawLandShadows=0.

If you’re experiencing mouse lag/over-smoothing, change the 1 to 0 for bMouseAcceleration=1 and add iPresentInterval=0 to the section marked [Display].

That’ll do me for now. But there are resources out there if you care about more general tweaks, or if you want to get a little more hardcore and want to enhance the graphics . I’d suggest you make back-ups of any file you alter, just in case.

Excitingly, there are already mods popping up: this tool lets you play in a borderless window.

And don’t forget yourself in all this. Remember to take regular push-up breaks and drink plenty of melted snow.

Anyway, if there’s anything you find that’s super useful, like how to unbind the character PoV from the mousewheel, leave a comment. I’ll add the best ones to the post.

119 Comments

I hear that skyrim doesnt have QTE’s at all. Therefore it cannot be considered “AAA” and I am hereby boycotting until bethesda has added said QTE’s. The sheer and blatant lack of QTE’s and the apparent use of “sandbox” reeks of cheapness.

How you can cover such a title, with its lack of linear plot is appalling, you should all be ashamed.

The first mission was great, you had to move from point A to point B and were allowed no deviation. as it should be.

but then the 2nd mission? wtf was that about? The game said “go to the place” but I was all “eff you, game.” and went the other way, fully expecting an invisible wall keeping me on the straight and narrow path of guided fun times, but was aghast to find that there was no wall! what black sorcery is this? How can a game expect me to enjoy it without telling me precisely how and where I am allowed to enjoy it?

I’m starting a petition to get Bethesda to add in invisible walls and impliment the guided fun times we all expect and love in our games.

Guys this isn’t remotely funny. People will start to believe there really isn’t chest high walls and sword camo if you keep it up, and it’s not fair to upset people like that. Come on, what did we all learn at the focus group?

I’ve been standing outside a door for twenty minutes and my squad leader hasn’t come over to open it or told me to open it during that entire time! Is it the wrong door? Actually, come to think of it, I don’t know where my squad leader is!

Nah, it’s cool. I heard there’s a whole quest-line QTE where you ride passenger on the back of different dragons. The NPC steers around for 30 minutes and you press buttons to “whoop” and “holler.” It’s really immersive.

“Nah, it’s cool. I heard there’s a whole quest-line QTE where you ride passenger on the back of different dragons. The NPC steers around for 30 minutes and you press buttons to “whoop” and “holler.” It’s really immersive.” – Best quip I’ve heard in days! lol. Suck it RAGE!

“I hear that skyrim doesnt have QTE’s at all. Therefore it cannot be considered “AAA” and I am hereby boycotting until bethesda has added said QTE’s. The sheer and blatant lack of QTE’s and the apparent use of “sandbox” reeks of cheapness.

How you can cover such a title, with its lack of linear plot is appalling, you should all be ashamed.”

Actually, it’s the open-world sandbox-like play that has made Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls so popular amongst those of us who favor them over other similar games. I haven’t played anything before Morrowwind, but I have played Morrowwind, Oblivion, the two Fallouts, and Skyrim, and they’re all open-world and sandbox-like. Although, Skyrim is the first one that seems like it has provided a never-ending set of missions, which is clearing out dungeons and towers for bounty. Well, thus far they seem never ending. I can’t say that I’ve actually had to do the same mission twice yet, although, they tend to feel like the same mission since they’re exactly the same except for the location and direction you approach from. Although direction is more up to you than anything else. I once snuck up on a bandit tower from the mountain side because it just so happened that from the direction I was coming from, I had to climb down the mountain wall, well jump down to points to avoid death, as there is no climbing in this game.

Anyhow, I absolutely revel in the open-world sandbox-like play in these games.

If you really don’t like the sandbox play, you should get other similar games. Almost none are as open world or sandbox as the Elder Scrolls games are. The closest ones I’ve seen, the Gothic series, aren’t nearly as open-world or sandbox-like, and on the surface, they almost look like Elder Scrolls clones, even though they aren’t. I think Shadow of Chernobyl is more linear because of the fact that they keep you rather confined. Although, if it were as big as most of the Elder Scrolls games, it would be pretty good as far as open-world goes. Rage and Borderlands aren’t nearly as open-world. I haven’t played Rage, but I’ve read it’s similar to Borderlands. Borderlands pretends to be open-world and sandbox-like, but when you actually play the game, you realize that an absurd overuse of cliffs and makeshift walls keep you pretty confined and focused on the missions at hand.

Right when I started the game I noted the claustrophobic FOV and just hit the console and typed fov 85, and it worked! The game seems to have kept most of the console commands from Oblivion. Another useful one to know is tcl (noclip) for when you get stuck on something or an NPC blocks a doorway.

Another thing I did was force Vsync off in the Nvidia control panel, that got rid of all input lag. I just can’t stand it, feels like my hand is tied to a rubber band or something.

Thanks for the mouse acceleration and self shadowing tips though, will go fix those right away!

Well, if Fallouts 3 keep their commands from Oblivion, then why not Skyrim? One thing I’m interested in are the TDT and SDT commands. TDT is supposed to show debug text, and it doesn’t work in Fallouts. This was crucial to me in Oblivion, since it allowed to observe how much points I still need to gain bonus to Strength or if that one hit won’t level me up to soon.

TCL is so useful in these Elder Scrolls games that the command should be taught in the tutorial as a standard in all of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and similar open-world games. They should also make a provision for using TCL with console versions as well.

I’m telling you TCL is mandatory for games like this. It has helped me in every single game that I have played from Bethesda many many many times. In such a huge and open world, it’s impossible to catch every single possible snare or glitch that makes your character get stuck in such a way that it requires a restart or loading of a saved game.

Nothing is so infuriating than to do things, take a lot of time figuring out things, and then you get stuck and can’t get out or falling through the floor. And it happens, not a lot, but periodically and often unexpectedly. TCL is the answer. It stops your character from being affected by gravity and it allows your character to walk through anything. Then you simply type the command in again to shut it off, after you’ve repositioned yourself of course.

A 120 FOV is a bit extreme, and, as mentioned, likely just for illustrative purposes. While the human eyes may have a FOV of 180*, that’s not exactly the same as a FOV in games. Binocular vision (what we see with both eyes) is more around 120*. This tends to be our field of focus, ie: where our eyes can clearly see objects. What you see clearly within this 120* is what game engines use as your FOV. This tends to vary widely between individuals, but is more around 70*-90* on the horizontal.

Now, all of this is well and good, so this means you should set a 120* FOV, right? No. If you were to do that, you would get noticeable fisheye-like warping. Most games use a FOV of 45*-60*. Typically, anything over 70* is going to start slightly warping on 4:3 resolutions. (another reason why consoles games have such low FOV settings) Using greater aspect ratios, you can more easily run using a 90* FOV without noticeable warping, but beyond that will increase the severity of warping. Having an accurate 120* FOV simply isn’t possible with current monitors’ aspect ratios. However, using something like an IMAX screen, you could certainly pull off a realistic 120* or 180* FOV.

I used to play Quake 3 Arena at 120. On a 14″ monitor. Made fast game faster!
90 is usually the minimum i can cope with. Every single game with low fov just gives me a bloody headache after 5 minutes, plus having to step 5 feet further back to see things i couldn’t see at waist height from 2 feet is an extreme irritation.

Hey Harlander:
THe best way to go about choosing an FOV is trial and error, however, the following is seen as fairly accurate (at least for me):
16:10 – (ie. 1920 x 1200) FOV 90
16:9 – (ie. 720p, 1080p, etc) FOV 80-90 (I use 87, most people I know use 85. 720 needs closer to 80)
4:3 – (ie. 1024×768) FOV 70-75 (I used 75)

Thanks for the tips Mr Pearson. I love the online solidarity between everyone playing it and experiencing their first few hours at the same time.

One thing I’m after is an easier way to switch between weapon loadouts than going into the inventory. I like to open my engagements with a sneak attack arrow before switching to weapon and shield, and it would be nice to be able to make a one button weapon switch.

For fast weapon switching: it seems they kind of forget to tell you – in the favourites menu, pressing a number will assign the highlighted piece of equipment to that key. So you can use it just like oblivion.

Also, for those who obsess over character creation to the point of rerolling to change hair or whatever, in the console type showracemenu and you can change your appearance whenever you like! There were some issues with stats resetting when this was used in oblivion so use this at your own risk, but I haven’t had any issues so far.

Oh thank goodness you can keybind it no numbers! Thanks for letting us know! I thought I would have to wait for a mod to do that like in Oblivion.

Also, whoever wanted to rotate the camera while moving in 3rd person.. I don’t think that’s possible but what you could try is pressing “c” for the auto-run and then in console type “TFC” for the fly-cam and use that. It’s very awkward but might be enough for what you want.

most games are not built with 2+ monitors in mind, borderless windowed mode can really help make that experience better. BF3 for instance is a nightmare on my dual monitor setup, You can move your mouse off the main screen when the cursor is up (respawns, menu, *long* waits between matches), and if you click on anything on the other screen it tries to minimize BF3 which results in either a dissconnect or crash 95% of the time, usualy locking up my PC for several minutes in the process.

Skyrim seems a bit wonky about alt tabbing at the moment as well, I must have accidentaly clicked off the screen durring character creation and had a hell of a time getting the game back full screen and working. borderless windowed mode solves these problems and should ship with every game ever.

“I’m never so immersed in a game that I don’t occasionally glance at twitter” I really don’t understand people like this, I think you’re doing video games wrong…. I play them exactly for immersion and to forget what idiots on twitter are saying.

Yeah, BC2 was the same – if you moved the mouse over to the empty screen, it would switch windows when you clicked the mouse. Which you usually did when you needed to shoot something, so it tended to happen at the worst possible times. The two solutions were to remember to disable your second screen, or make sure you only ever turned left (if your second screen was on the right).

Gawd, I’m so old. I’ve had a dual-monitor setup for at least nine years but I’ve never tried playing games in windowed mode because (even longer-ago) 3-D accelerator cards (as they were then known) didn’t work windowed.

Are you telling me that windowed games work at the same framerate as fullscreen nowadays?

Does Skyrim suffer from the same problem that Fallout 3 suffered from, where if you turned off Vsync, and your FPS went over 60, you would start running faster and if it went under you would run slower? Was very annoying, either put up with mouse lag, or run insanely fast indoors.

Yes, people on the bethesda forums are reporting that issue. So you have to keep V-Sync on, tweak the mouse acceleration in the .ini and just deal with it. I’ve noticed also that the mouse speed is tied to FPS, so if you’re running on settings that are too high and making your game stutter you’re going to also experience poor mouse handling.

One thing I’ve noticed with my tinkering is that if I turn the ‘reflect sky’ option on… the game crashes whenever it tries to reflect the sky. So, there’s one thing to check if you keep getting random hangs!

I’ve tried plugging all sorts of weird and wonderful numbers into the display part of the ini, but I’ll be damned if I can get anything to have a noticeable effect. I thought if I could just manage to disable shadows it might have a chance of running well, but unfortunately I’m too much of an idiot.

At the end of your Documents/My Games/Skyrim/Skyrim.ini file, add:
[Controls]
fMouseHeadingYScale=0.0200
fMouseHeadingXScale=0.0200
You may have to tweak the numbers until you discover what works for you.

(I actually had to use different values for x and y to make it feel right.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if the logo file gets restored by Steam either on next startup or when downloading the next patch. Probably not much of an issue if it’s not too large a file. If it is pretty meaty then you may want to set the game to not auto update so you can put the file back into place before each update occurs.

I’ve had some issues with changing keybinds. I set r to change between first and third person. The option to loot all from a container is r, and on occasion looting all will switch my POV when it exits the container. Bogus.

It’s a horrible dvd case, and mine came without the game cover sleeve in the actual plastic. And the map is not exactly cloth, it’s more of resume paper textured. Still very nice, but I wouldn’t roll it up and toss it around as if it was cloth.

And it tastes like temptation (midterm in 7 hours, must. Not. Play. Marks on the line as well as a 25 dollar entry fee (bets are on that I will crack)).

Is anyone else having problems with the R key not working in some menus? I can’t use it to drop items from my inventory (had to put things in containers instead) and it didn’t work in the alchemy table either (I could click the text though). Maybe it’s because I re-bound whatever function is normally on the R key to something else? The UI seems a little buggy overall.

Ah, yes. It does odd things, that. Loot all (which is R) still works, although as a commenter noted above it sometimes switches camera when you use it. To drop things, use whatever you bound Ready Weapon to. It’s actually the Ready Weapon command that drops things, but the interface tells you it’s just ‘r’.

Changeable FOV , runs great , no QTE’s , mouse without acceleration or other crap <che… oh, wait. With vsync off (and I really can't play any game with vsync on, the mouse lag is terrible) your mouse y axis sensitivity depends on the frame rate the game is running! So in-doors y axis sensitivity is often three times more than x axis. Outdoors when fps drops down to reasonable levels it gets better but is never perfect. There are .ini tweaks for the mouse but so far nothing that actually fixes this specific issue. There's separate sensitivity setting for x and y axis but it won't help because the y sensitivity fluctuates.

I've never seen a game when one axis sensitivity depends on your frame rate but I really hope it's fixable and is being fixed as we speak. Or write.

Hmm was actually surprised at my gts 250 playing in 1080p smooth and looking good at the same time, -AA of course but Its better than having to run out and get a gfx card this close to christmas, + 5 days from he’s out off her oven :).

FOV 75 is what im used to, I always use it but dosent it depend on which res your playing at? or maybe screen ratio.

Why oh why are devs still hiding Field of view setting in ini files? It is the single most important adjustment you need to make in order to to avoid motion sickness when you adjust the distance between you and the screen.

1. The iron-sighty sensitivity drop when using bow and arrows is.. ugh. Really hoping there is some hidden variable for disabling that.

2. The spoil-o-matic compass is unfortunately still there. Yes, you can disable it by setting hud opacity to 0… but then you also can’t see your health/mana (somewhat essential I think? or are there non-hud warnings when you’re running low?). I honestly can’t understand how the devs thought that putting “hey, to your left over that hill is a daedric shrine you haven’t found yet!” in a game that’s about exploration (at least, for me) was a good idea. Could mod it out in Oblivion, but modtools haven’t been released yet?

3. Game feels… stuttery, even when running a “solid” 60 fps (solid since it goes 60/59/61). Far Cry 2 / Source engine games have the same problem on my rig, but there I could solve it by setting maxfps to 60. Haven’t been able to find an equivalent command here. :(

(maybe some of these points have been mentioned in the wot i think, but I didn’t read it to avoid even the mildest spoilers).

Have currently been playing for a few hours without looking at my map (or compass ^^ ) once, am completely lost, and loving it.

Disable compass command works without breaking anything. The bars just do not show up when they are max and nothing is happening. Not too hard to find your way around the world, easier than Morrowind I would say.

Playing without the compass OR using the in-game map is rather fun. I have the huge paper map pinned up next to my monitor and try to keep track of where I am just from what I see in the world.
I’ve not followed many quests yet, so will be interesting to see if I end up needing to use the in-game map to know where I’m meant to be going.

Well, after reading about how the leveling system has changed and how they’ve scaled enemy encounters differently, I am now properly excited to buy this one. Just ordered it on my Steam-mo-tron, actually.

I’m still a bit stumped, though. Usually by this time of day I’d expect to see a half-dozen comments calling the lot of us idiots for enjoying things or saying that games aren’t fun unless they include some arbitrary feature or another. Nice change of pace, really.

I am quite hoping for a mod that allows you to ride horses in first person. I find the switch from first to third somewhat immersion breaking. So much so in fact that for the moment I’m avoiding using horses. Very petty I know, but it really bugs me for some reason.

It’s also pretty damn hard to see where you’re going on the horse, since the camera is arbitrarily set very low to the ground. What’s even worse is that you control the horse with the keyboard, BUT ALSO WITH THE MOUSE! So if you thought you could take a look to your side while your horsy is galloping into the sunset, think again. Instead you’ll just careen off the road and get stuck in some rock. Bugger.

Default FOV is claustrophobic — perfect word for it. Unfortunately, no one thought to make this variable in the Xbox version, even though it’s a highly personal setting and affects the atmosphere immensely. Oh well. Wish list for the next ES game, I guess, if enough people clamour for it.

Low FoV is how they get a game that looks like this to even run on an xbox.

And the game honestly does look great even on a console with ancient tech in it, but it’d be a rainy day in hell before they’d let you mess with graphics settings like that. They fear the bad PR of ppl upping things and then complaining of bad framerates and such.